AS AMERICANS GATHERED for picnics, fireworks, and fellowship over the July 4th holiday, Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello hosted its 63rd annual immigration and naturalization ceremony, swearing in 74 new American citizens from 40 countries across five continents. Their stories – of their long roads here, joy in joining the American family, and enduring pull of the United States as a beacon of liberty – remind us of the promise of the Declaration of Independence we celebrate in this 249th anniversary year. They also offer a downpayment on the more perfect union these newest Americans can help us become.

Jefferson would have approved. The ability to leave one’s country and join another was, he wrote in 1817, a “natural right, like that of our right to life, liberty, the use of our faculties, the pursuit of happiness”: the unalienable rights, endowed by our creator, he had enumerated in the Declaration decades before.

Keynote speaker Ken Burns captured the spirit of the day and magic of the venue by noting that in 1776 -- when kings ruled in France and Britain, a Czarina in St. Petersburg, an emperor in China, a Sultan in Constantinople, and a Shogun in Japan -- a group of men in Philadelphia envisioned a system and wrote words in a Declaration that “turned the world upside down.” And out of a bloody struggle, the Revolutionary War, Burns said, America “came to be about the noblest aspirations of humankind.” Judge John Charles Thomas, the first Black American appointed to Virginia’s Supreme Court, declaimed the Declaration’s preamble to an eager crowd of more than three thousand. It took several minutes to get through those 274 words, because of cheering among those determined to govern themselves.

After all the speechifying, and the business of motions and oaths, Chief Judge Elizabeth Dillon of the Western District Court of Virginia invited these newly-sworn-in Americans to share their stories.  

A young woman recounted fleeing Afghanistan in 2020 for “safety, freedom and a future…a life to speak freely, grow, and live in dignity.” A 35-year-old woman from Peru had lived most of her life in Texas with her parents, waiting and striving like so many others to become an American. An Irishman chose to be a citizen not just to partake of the rights of Americans, but to share in “the responsibility to have my voice count as a parent, neighbor and citizen.” A woman from an impoverished family in Cameroon followed her father’s advice “to focus on studies to a brighter future,” earning a master’s degree and a PhD. She contrasted the opportunity in America even with that of Europe. An older woman from Syria simply danced with joy before a roaring crowd of her fellow Americans.

A new citizen from Venezuela expressed amazement that her naturalization ceremony was at Monticello, but it was the most appropriate venue of all. Judge Michael Urbanski noted that these new citizens were taking the same oath new Americans had pledged since President Thomas Jefferson signed the Naturalization Act of 1802. Like many American leaders since, Jefferson believed immigration made our country stronger, fairer, richer, and truer to its ideals.

He also knew it made us more skillful, more nimble. It was both right and prudent, he wrote, for the United States to “consecrate a sanctuary for those whom the misrule of Europe may compel to seek happiness in other climes.” If the old world was Pharoanic Egypt, the United States should be “Canaan.”

As those who have witnessed naturalization ceremonies know, they are powerful reminders to Americans born in this country of why we should value it, and of what it can become. In 1915, President Woodrow Wilson expressed the sentiment well in a ceremony making new citizens in Philadelphia: “if some of us have forgotten what America believed in, you…imported in your own hearts a renewal of the belief…. If I have in any degree forgotten what America was intended for, I will thank God if you will remind me. I was born in America. You dreamed dreams of what America was to be.”

In the century that preceded the Declaration of Independence, the vast majority of the North American population had come from outside the American continent. Almost everyone in the 13 rebellious American colonies – whether of European or African descent – had arrived there from someplace else, within two generations or less. Even Native Americans uprooted and replanted often. Since the big bang of 1776, the United States has constantly been reborn by drawing in populations from around the world, breathing life into the country’s motto, e pluribus unum.

As America moves into the 250^th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence in 2026, we ought to learn more about our country’s plural origin story, and the ways we became one, born from many. Our founding ideals have endured the test of time precisely because of the recommitment we saw on Jefferson’s mountaintop on July 4: a ceremony that spurred us all to renew our oath, our vows. We’re so grateful to our new and varied fellow Americans for breathing fresh life into those ancient ideals and reminding us of the relevance they hold for our world today and for creating possibilities for future generations.